Rest in power Horace Ov - by Ashley Clark
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The great Sir Horace Ové has died following a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, his family announced this morning.
Below is an excerpt, focused on Ové, from a much longer piece that I wrote about the history of Black British protest cinema for Sight & Sound magazine in the tumultuous and emotionally draining summer of 2020. These few words barely scratch the surface of Ové’s voluminous suite of artistic achievements—for example, there is no mention of his early documentaries like Reggae and King Carnival, his acting chops (see this earlier letter on Black Safari), his gorgeous portrait photography, or his directorial contributions to the important late 1970s BBC series Empire Road—but it may be of interest for newcomers to his work. (Pressure, discussed below in full plot detail, has been recently remastered, and will screen simultaneously at this year’s London and New York Film Festivals. It is not to be missed.)
An early pioneer was Horace Ové, who was born in Belmont, Trinidad and Tobago, in 1939, and came to Britain in 1960. Following a stint as a film extra in Rome, Ové returned to the UK to study at the London School of Film Technique (now London Film School), then began making documentaries, including 1969’s Baldwin’s Nigger.
This gripping vérité-style short, made at the height of America’s Black Power movement and in the early stages of Britain’s own version, was filmed at London’s West Indian Students’ Centre, and shows the writer James Baldwin, alongside comedian Dick Gregory, addressing a group of students about the Black experience in America and how it relates to Britain and the Caribbean. The film is thrilling not just because it captures Baldwin, eyes ablaze, at the peak of his rhetorical powers, but because it offers evidence that political discourse was thriving among young Black people in Britain—Baldwin’s audience are not just passive listeners; they speak their minds, too.
The central character of Ové’s first fiction feature film Pressure (1975), however, is no firebrand. Tony (Herbert Norville), a British-born, 16-year-old recent school leaver, is caught adrift between his Trinidadian parents’ religious conservatism and enduring respect for British colonial power, and the staunch Black Power activism of his elder brother Colin (Oscar James). Tony tentatively joins the Black Power cause, mostly because of his crush on the charismatic American activist Sister Louise (Sheila Scott-Wilkinson). Colin eventually winds up in jail on false drug possession charges, and the film ends with Tony and a sparse band of protestors on a rain-sodden ‘Free Colin’ march outside the Old Bailey—it may be the most forlorn-looking protest sequence ever filmed.
Despite Pressure’s ambivalent tone and observational style, it was held back from any significant release for at least two years by its own financial backer, the British Film Institute*. According to Ové, the BFI wasn’t overly keen on the property in the first place. “Well, the BFI didn’t really want to do it, to be quite honest,” the director said in a 2005 interview at the Barbican. “We took that idea around television, different companies and everybody turned their back, and the BFI was a bit worried about doing it at the time also.”
It is sadly telling that the first Black British feature film—a landmark moment that should have been a cause for celebration—was handled by white institutional forces in such a hesitant, ham-fisted manner. It was eventually published on DVD by the BFI—better late than never—in 2005.
Though Ové was only able to make one more theatrically released feature film (Playing Away, 1986), he worked steadily in television, taking care to foreground the dignity of his Black characters. He associate-produced Franco Rosso’s short documentary The Mangrove Nine (1973), an account of the sensational trial of a group of Black British activists accused of inciting a riot at a 1970 protest against the police targeting of Notting Hill’s Mangrove Caribbean Restaurant. Not only did the nine—who included Darcus Howe, a founder member of the British Black Panther Party—win their freedom, they forced the first ever judicial acknowledgement of racism in the police.
In 1979, Ové directed the BBC Play for Today film A Hole in Babylon, a dramatization of the 1975 ‘Spaghetti House siege’ in Knightsbridge, in which a botched attempt by three Black men to commit an armed robbery escalated into a six-day stand-off. In the eyes of the British press and the Metropolitan police, these men were simply violent thugs, but Ové gave them psychological depth, complex motivations (the men had been influenced by African anti-colonial and American liberation movements), and fleshed out the social context for Black people, who were tired of being shut out of society at every turn.
*On Friday September 29th, 2023, I removed the final clause, in bold, from the original sentence: “Despite Pressure’s ambivalent tone and observational style, it was held back from any significant release for at least two years by its own financial backer, the British Film Institute, which was alarmed by its honest depiction of police brutality.” This has long been rumored to be the case—and frankly, it’s believable!—but in the process of editing an official obituary for Ové for Sight and Sound magazine, I was made aware of a Time Out article from the late 1970s which instead detailed a byzantine and bureaucratic distribution wrangle leading to the delay. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the original suggestion is without any merit, but I think it’s fair to make the amend.
Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
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